RATP is looking for highly technical profiles for the Grand Paris network

In total, the public company announced on Thursday that it would recruit 6.600 people in 2026, including 3.500 in Ile-de-France to enable it to "meet the challenges of the upcoming opening of the first lines of Grand Paris".

The group, which had already experienced a record year for employment in 2025 for the same reasons with 7.300 hires, will also recruit 850 people in French cities where it manages a transport network such as Lyon, Toulon or Angers, and 2.250 in the rest of the world, notably in the United States, but also in Egypt, Italy and Saudi Arabia.

The RATP is far from recruiting only bus drivers or metro drivers.

"We are looking for skills in infrastructure, civil engineering for tunnel maintenance, electromechanics, maintenance, automation, and even IT and cybersecurity," the group's new CEO, Xavier Piechaczyk, told the press.

The challenge for the company is to ensure, starting this year, the management of the infrastructure network of all the new lines of the Grand Paris Express, the immense automated metro loop under construction for several years around Paris.

Because the RATP has been designated both as the manager of all the new infrastructure - tunnels, rails, catenaries, electricity supply, underground pumping... - and as the carrier for the operation of line 15 south, which will connect from 2027 Pont de Sèvres, in the southwest of Paris, and Noisy-Champs, in the southeast.

The first section to be put into service will start in October, on line 18 (Orly Airport-Versailles) south of Paris. It will be operated by another transport company, the Keolis group, which won the tender.

The RATP, the infrastructure manager, must be ready to get the general mechanic working by then.

"There are many technical jobs at RATP," Mr. Piechaczyk pointed out, also emphasizing the need to recruit women, who are currently underrepresented (21% of employees).

"Meritocratic group"

On Thursday, the man who until last month headed the French high-voltage electricity network manager, RTE, gave the press a tour of one of the seven electrical substations dating from the 1960s-70s, which supplies the Paris metro network, located near the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

Two entire buildings where electricity arrives as high-voltage alternating current supplied by RTE: at 63.000 volts for one, and 225.000 volts for the other. It is then transformed into direct current, then reduced in voltage to 15.000 volts to power the subways.

At ease in this world of engineers from which he comes, Mr. Piechaczyk explained in particular the need for highly compressed insulating gas in this type of infrastructure, which guarantees the safety of high-voltage electrical substations in dense urban environments.

Another little-known technical activity at the RATP, he pointed out, is that the Parisian underground network "evacuates 10 million cubic meters of water per year which must be constantly pumped from the subsoil".

"It's a meritocratic group where you can start as an operator, become a senior technician, and leave as a manager," he added. "That's invaluable."

To meet its needs, RATP is looking for two-thirds operators (operational agents) and one-third managers with a bac + 2 or bac + 5 degree.

Upon his departure, former CEO Jean Castex, who has since become CEO of SNCF, was pleased to have received 400.000 CVs last year, a historic record, all the more remarkable as RATP was lacking bus drivers and had suffered a deep disaffection and a wave of employee departures after the Covid crisis.